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April 22, 2012

Filthy Review - Penumbra

Penumbra (2011)

Review by Jude Felton

Some movies definitely benefit from not knowing too much
about them, before you watch them. For some reason many trailers and
promotional pieces like to dissect the entire movie for you, making it easier
to digest. Or is it a case of the film not being easy to categorize, therefore
the need to reveal too much about the plot? Well, I never reveal too much, in
fact I find writing about the plot to be tedious and a tad pointless. Sure, you’ll
get the basic outline and a few bits and bobs, but I will not walk anyone
through the film.

Penumbra, which hails from Argentina, is one such movie
that really benefits from knowing only the bare minimum before watching.
Directed by the team of Adrian Garcia Bogliano and Ramiro Garcia Bogliano, who
previous brought us Cold Sweat (Sudor Frio), Penumbra is a curious little movie
that offers more to the viewer than what you see on the screen, or at least it
did to me.

The basic plot involves successful business woman Marga
(Christina Brondo), who works for a Real Estate company and is in the process
of trying to rent out a rundown apartment in Buenos Aries. She hates the city,
and isn’t too fond of the country, and is eager to get back to her native
Spain, but business is business. She shows one gentleman the apartment and he
is insistent that his client will love the place and offers more than it is
worth. Obviously Marga isn’t ready to turn this down. All this does though is
set into effect a series of strange and often hallucinating chain of events.

There are plenty of quirky characters on display in
Penumbra, who seem only to serve to make Marga’s life more difficult than it
already is, or is it just an effect of the impending solar eclipse? The title
Penumbra actually means, amongst other things, the shadow cast by the moon
during an eclipse.

Penumbra never went in the direction I expected it to, and
constantly keeps twisting and turning into an almost maddening sense of
reality. The movie’s visual style also adds to the effect of the story, with
rich golden colors throughout, and some clever camerawork. The score, which
comes and goes throughout, does at first seems at odds with what is going on in
terms of the plot, but after a while I found it only added to the sense of
paranoia and confusion that is prevalent throughout.

The film certainly isn’t going to please everyone, with
its style and plot being the way that it is, and I did find it too be a little
too vague in places, especially towards the later stages. That being said it
was an engrossing story with an engaging cast bringing it to life, and the
technical aspects I already mentioned also adding to the film’s overall effect.

The film is most definitely a quirky thriller at heart, with
the majority of the action being through the dialogue between characters. That
being said there are one or two moments where the claret does flow, and when it
does it is fairly spectacular.

Overall, Penumbra is a good solid film that is not the
type you will see every day. The ideas the filmmakers try to express don’t
always come off, but on the whole it was a quite decent movie that I would
recommend to fans that are tired of the predictable.

Penumbra is released by IFC Films and is playing select theaters and is available on VOD.